EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: The Queen gets her second Tube line - but she still doesn't have her own airport

The Queen is delighted that Crossrail will become the Elizabeth Line in 2018.

Her 25 years on the throne were marked by the Jubilee Line in 1979. But no airport has been named after her, an honour bagged by John F Kennedy, Indira Gandhi, Pierre Trudeau and Ronald Reagan, as well as John Lennon, John Wayne, Bob Hope, Wolfgang Mozart, Franz Liszt and the Greek physician Hippocrates.

Perhaps they’ll rename Heathrow one day.

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The Queen is delighted that Crossrail will become the Elizabeth Line in 2018

After agreeing to accept the post of ‘enterprise tsar’ from Gordon Brown in 2009 – and subsequently a peerage – Sugar hailed the Scot as ‘one of the best prime ministers we’ve had in years’.

Then he quit Labour, calling the party ‘anti-enterprise’. He’s good at bullying wet-behind-the-ears contestants on The Apprentice but – like some recently anointed peers – isn’t regarded as an adornment to the Upper House.

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Al Alvarez has been talking about his friendship with fellow poet Sylvia Plath, pictured, who killed herself, aged 30, in 1963.

As the wife of ‘controlling’ Ted Hughes, who became Poet Laureate, her death is discussed endlessly in feminist circles.

But an extract from her 1963 journal, quoted in the current New York Review of Books, makes her out to be rather flighty. She says she and Alvarez were in bed at his London home when the telephone rang. She says she put her foot over his manhood ‘so that he was appropriately attired to receive the call’.

But Alvarez, now 86, tells me: ‘She made this up. Why, I don’t know. We were good friends but I never f****d her. Ever.’

Al Alvarez has been talking about his friendship with poet Sylvia Plath, pictured, who killed herself in 1963

Robert Sellers’s The Secret Life of Ealing Studios tells a curious story about the popular comic Tommy Trinder, who died aged 80 in 1989.

Novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, then acting as a slave girl extra, met him in a dark studio corner. He wore a short toga, she said, adding: ‘He was doing a little dance, lifting his toga and muttering, “Now you see it, now you don’t”.’

The golden years of British cinema!

Naomie Harris, pictured, told ITV's Lorraine Kelly that she is 'completely in love' with co-star Will Smith